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Now, I wouldn’t have chosen to run Sunday’s Charlotte Allen piece on how women are dumb in the Post or any other publication, but I do think thenear universaloutrage over the piece is a bit much. The piece was clearly intended to be a light hearted send-up of dumb, offensive views about female behavior rather than an actual dumb, offensive piece. In theory, it should’ve worked in the same way as when incredibly brilliant, driven, and successful women with some sort of conservative pedigree dryly say things like, “Of course I support the patriarchy. This country was fine till women got the right to vote.” (Just trust me when I say this happens.) It’s obviously ludicrous and self-negating, and somewhat amusingly allows for some playful jabbing at the stereotype of conservative women. It’s not epic humor, but it works in conversation as a quick aside. The problem is, Allen’s piece is neither particularly funny nor particularly clever and doesn’t do a very good job of indicating that it’s basically satirical. Satire can be a tough thing to pull off, no doubt, but the Post’s editors should at least be smart enough to know they don’t have the ear for it and stick to running pleasantly bland columns about political affairs as usual.

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Umm…is this post supposed to be satirical? Or do you really think Allen’s piece was written as satire? That she doesn’t actually believe that “even with all the special mentoring and role-modeling the 21st century can provide, the number of women in these fields will always lag behind the number of men, for good reason”? That would be a really bizarre reading of the piece.

“If it insulted people, that was not the intent,” Outlook editor John Pomfret told me this morning, calling the piece “tongue-in-cheek.”

“She wanted to make fun of this issue,” Pomfret said. “A lot of people have taken it very seriously.”

Now, she might believe some of it — I don’t know — but it does seem pretty clear that this was intended at least partially as satire of some sort. It failed completely, and if she got confused half-way through and decided to stick in some not-satire stuff, that only makes it more of a failure.

Sorry, but this post doesn’t quite pass the sniff test. By the logical standards you’re promoting here, any misguided, ridiculous, or offensive piece of writing can just be shrugged off, equated by analogy to some joke that I once heard. I’m no longer required to take anything seriously, because it bears a faint resemblance to some joke or humorous anecdote.

I don’t think that’s really what you believe, but it’s pretty invariably the outcome of what you’re actually saying.

I wouldn’t know Charlotte Allen if she came up and swooned in my face. But I am sure that she does possess a sense of humor. At the least, as a professional writer, I am sure that she is quite aware of her limitations, and if she absolutely cannot crack a joke, she would not attempt to write a humorous column.

But, amazingly, here is a supposedly satirical column, with the amazing quality that it lacks a single funny joke, whatsoever.

And if you really think so little of Ms. Allen that you think she could pen such an ahumorous piece unwittingly, you are also positing that, while the entire editorial staff of the Post may be aware of the concept of humor, its actual execution escapes them entirely.

In short, I don’t believe it. I think it was a ridiculous piece of writing, consisting of nothing more than an entire season’s worth of The King of Queens-level jokes about shrewish women and their inability to do math, which is, like, So. Hard. And the editors, thinking they were making a bold statement by posting this drivel, because it was a woman! Calling out feminists! let it slip by.

I’m female, and I did not take the piece as satire. I wasn’t offended, either. I took it as a serious comment on some of the more ridiculous behavior that women indulge in, behavior that often has me sighing and wondering what on earth people are thinking.

Comments on ridiculous male behavior, often written by men, are pretty ordinary. And men, as a group, can be pretty ridiculous at times. The thing is, women can too. (The shoe thing alone… what’s that about?) And pointing out the latter isn’t any more offensive to me than pointing out the former.

Some of the actual observations were spot on. The Clinton campaign, chick lit, the celebrity cult, galloping hypochondria… who isn’t mortified by all this? I don’t know if we have to be any more mortified than the sex that makes up most of the prison population, but it’s all still hanging over our heads.

Are women so fragile (a ridiculous thing to be) that they can’t bear having their own foibles exposed by one of their own? I would hope not.

If she’s so utterly incompetent that she’s unable to convey the fact that her piece is satire without having an editor telegraph it, she deserves all the opprobrium she’s getting and should be banned for life from a keyboard.

I agree with you that it was a serious piece, for the reasons I listed above.

But I disagree with you wholeheartedly on the question of whether it was appropriate for the op-ed pages of the Washington Post or not. I agree that women sometimes exhibit ridiculous behaviors. They are often spoofed as offensive stereotypes, but that doesn’t make the behaviors themselves any less ridiculous.

Similarly, men exhibit ridiculous behaviors: we watch too much football, can’t pick our socks up off the floor, and spend hundreds of dollars on electric gadgets mostly so we can say ‘huh huh, pretty cool, huh huh.’

But can you, or Peter, show me an example of an op-ed article in a major American newspaper whose entirety consists of enumerating these ridiculous male behaviors? Maybe in the Style section, or the Life section, or in the weekly humor column, sure. But on the op-ed page? I know I can’t.

And if not, then it’s specific to women, and incredibly offensive to masculine old me. Or would be, if I could pick my face out of this plate of nachos for long enough to notice.

Well, I’m a woman and I agree with Christopher. It’s difficult to take this as a light-hearted mocking of the foibles of women when it starts hauling in actual data and seems to be making a real point that women are dumber than men. Unless we’re meant to take the data in a wink-nudge “Oh, nobody really believes that“ kind of way, which hardly seems like a safe assumption. There is a real discussion to be had about innate gender differences, but this isn’t it.

Another problem is that the more light-hearted early part of it is really just the old snob lament about the bad taste of middlebrow America, written in a gender-specific way to make it look like she’s critiquing “her own.”

The author doesn’t exhibit much talent at satire or “light-hearted mockery”, if that was what she was attempting, but I fail to understand the objection to “hauling in actual data” to “mak[e] a real point that women are dumber than men”. (And what is the purpose of satire and mockery but to make a serious point?) If “actual data” are being adduced and “real points” being made, why doesn’t it qualify as “real discussion…about innate gender differences”? Is there some standard of tact or writing talent that has to be met before a discussion becomes “real”?

And why is lamenting dumbed-down tastes – general or gender-specific – a “problem”?

Charlotte Allen herself answers the question of whether it was meant as satire in an online discussion on the Post’s website:

First…
Charlotte Allen: I wouldn’t quite use the word “ironic,” but yes, I meant to be funny but with a serious point—that women want to be taken seriously but quite often don’t act serious. Also, that women and men really are different.